From: gyudon_addict
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2025 15:53:44 -0700
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There isn't much to teach beyond what you can learn by just going
through the sites themselves, but if you want a bit of context on where
gikopoi's "community" came from, I'll give you a short history lesson:
Around 2005 or so there was a flash chatroom called Bar Giko. There were
several similar kinds of sites around then, and they were popular with
2channel users since they were anonymous and used their characters. At
some point 4chan /b/ users discovered the site, and although rich
cultural exchanges were recorded, they were quickly segregated off to
their own section of the site. This tradition continued for a while
after the opening of Bar Gikopoi, the successor to Bar Giko. These are
the earliest traces of the Gikopoi International "_for" community.
I think Gikopoi saw its renewed interest from 4chan on /jp/ around 2008,
and this carried on for a few years. This is where a lot of the older
guys like Archduke came from. You can go on warosu.org/jp/ and search
"gikopoi" and sort by ascending date to see the old threads. There's
also a lot of screenshots of flash Gikopoi and a few of Bar Giko on
booru.gikopoi.com.
So Gikopoi kind of just existed peacefully in this state for several
years. It was somewhat popular with the old /jp/ and textboard crowd,
and it was a successful community. Until flash died.
(The servers for flash giko didn't shut down until fairly recently, you
could still play it if you had a browser with flash. It was a ghost
town, but a few of us went back there for kicks a couple times.)
With flash on the chopping block, Gikopoi needed a modern replacement.
Apparently this wasn't a task for the much larger Japanese community, so
international user "iccanobif" made Gikopoi2 (later renamed Gikopoipoi).
This modern HTML5 replacement subsumed the remaining users, both the
western and Japanese community (which the owner of Gikopoi apparently
wasn't too happy about). This is the site known as gikopoipoi.net.
Archduke, one of the original users kept up the tradition of organizing
parties for /jp/ around the holidays, and this is where I and a couple
others came from. I think I found it around October 2021, and started
being a regular around new years.
Around the summer of next year, Archduke and a few others weren't too
pleased with the way iccanobif and his friends were running the place,
so with Gikopoipoi being open source, he forked it and started running
his own server, Gikopoi.com. There wasn't really any drama involved,
there's a small group back on poipoi that doesn't like Archduke for some
reason, but iccanobif is cool with it and has been known to show up and
stream on odd occasions.
Archduke runs it pretty lax, and he likes working with everyone else to
do new projects for the site. There's been a lot of unique users over
time, and it turned out to be a distinct community.
The wiki and BBS kind of exist for our own entertainment. A lot of us
have a penchant for creative writing and a connection to the old text
board scene, which used to do a similar thing (see: tanasinn.info).
Hope that answers some of your questions.
ArchDuke comments:
Yeah so Gikopoi had been a thing on /b/ since 2004. it was an early wordfilter there. /a/ and later /jp/ would decide to hang out there for fun, especially on NewYearsEve but also on random other occasional holidays. After the death of Flash was announced for 2020-12-31 bif began subtly promoting bifpoi, initially on some free domain name but also on a discord for the old boys that Rosuto launched.
From ~2010-2020 there was generally a max of 10 users split between Taiwan and ENG speakers. The biggest innovation for the flash game was bif's custom "idlepoi" client that allowed people to be logged in for more than 30 minutes while idling . Generally speaking there would only be one or two other people logged in MAX for casual regular convos in US evening periods.
The most epic and legendary event on flashpoi _for was some dude's sex stream. You can see me and CATARP present in the screenshots floating around there... along with feor (iirc)
After bif started making gikopoipoi the old "regulars" (what, less than 10 of us?) began logging on there and bug testing it. The first maps were dev lounge and then the "hell room"; originally poipoi rooms were PNG files manually scraped from screenshots from the flash game (shout out to moon) before SVGs could be automatically generated from the flash game files .
When it became clear that bif would be selective about accepting certain kinds of post-Flash game content over other kinds, and he and maf began banning people based on subjective biases, gikopoi.com was launched as a giko fork that would accept ALL user-submitted content and ONLY ban people for violating US law rather than personal moderator biases.